Social Media-Driven Digitalization and Customer-Facing Agility: An Empirical Study of Fashion SMEs

• Abbas Ahsun

  Texas University

  Author

The fashion sector’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have rapidly adopted social media platforms as primary digitalization channels, yet the precise relationship between social media-driven digitalization and customer-facing agility remains underexplored in empirical literature. This study addresses this gap by investigating how specific social media digitalization practices—content engagement, real-time customer responsiveness, and platform-based market sensing—predict customer-facing agility in fashion SMEs. Using a quantitative cross-sectional design, data were collected from 312 fashion SME owners and managers operating in Indonesia’s creative fashion clusters. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to test the hypothesized relationships. The findings reveal that social media-driven digitalization explains 89.4% of the variance in customer-facing agility (R² = 0.894), with real-time responsiveness (β = 0.412, p < 0.001) and platform-based market sensing (β = 0.367, p < 0.001) emerging as the strongest predictors, while content engagement intensity showed a weaker but significant effect (β = 0.198, p = 0.004). These results suggest that fashion SMEs derive customer agility not merely from social media presence but from the depth of responsive and sensing routines embedded in their digitalization practices. The study contributes a validated predictive framework for social media-driven agility, offering actionable guidance for SME managers and policymakers seeking to prioritize digitalization investments that enhance customer responsiveness.

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Copyright (c) 2026 Abbas Ahsun (Author)

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